OTN Appreciation Day | The ORACLE-BASE Blog

Oracle Developer Community (ODC) Appreciation Day 2018 (#ThanksODC)

It’s that time of year where we say #ThanksODC…

History

Back in the day we had a community site called Oracle Technology Network (OTN), which is why the first incarnation of this event was called #ThanksOTN. Later OTN got re-branded as Oracle Developer Community (don’t call it ODC 🙂 ), so last year we got #ThanksODC. That confused a few people, as they thought this was about the Oracle Developer Champions, Oracle Database Cloud, Oracle Developer Cloud or some other such stuff. It wasn’t. Some people didn’t identify as developers, so thought it was not for them. None of that is true. It’s pretty simple. I can’t image there is anyone working with Oracle technology that hasn’t used forums, read articles or downloaded Oracle software from OTN/ODC over the years. You must have directly, or indirectly, benefited from the work done by the people at Oracle who support our community. This is just an opportunity to say thanks to those brave folks who endure our endless moaning. 🙂

When is it?

Every year I pick a date and have to change it because of a national holiday on some country. 🙂 At the moment the date of the event is in two weeks time on Thursday 11th October 2018.

Check back closer to the time to make sure the date hasn’t changed. If we have to move it, it will only be by a day either side.

How can I get involved?

Here is the way it works.

Write a blog post. The title should be in the format “ODC Appreciation Day : <insert-the-title-here>“.
The content can be pretty much anything. See the section below.
Tweet out the blog post using the hashtag #ThanksODC.
Publishing the posts on the same day allows us to generate a buzz. In previous years loads of people were on twitter retweeting, making it even bigger. The community is spread around the world, so the posts will be released over a 24 hour period.
Oracle employees are welcome to join in. I’m happy for you to post about a feature of your product you think adds value, but please don’t just do a sales pitch for your product. 🙂
As always, you are not allowed to call me a kiss-ass, then subsequently join in. 🙂

Like previous years, it would be really nice if we could get a bunch of first-timers involved, but it’s also an opportunity to see existing folks blog for the first time in ages! 🙂

The following day I write a summary post that includes links to all the posts that were pushed out through the day. You can see examples of the last two here.

What Should I Write About?

Rather than having an individual theme, which can exclude some people, this year you can write about whatever you want. Here are some suggestions that might help you.

My favourite feature of {the Oracle-related tech you work on}.
How I got started using Oracle technology.
My biggest screw up, and how I fixed it.
How the cloud has affected my job.
What I get out of the Oracle Community.
What feature I would love to see added to {the Oracle-related tech you work on}.
The project I worked on that I’m the most proud of. (Related to Oracle tech of course)

It’s not limited to these. You can literally write about anything Oracle-related. The posts can be short, which makes it easy for new people to get involved. If you do want to write about something technical, that’s fine. You can also write a simple overview post and link to more detailed posts on a subject if you like. In the previous two years the posts I enjoyed the most were those that showed the human side of things, but that’s just me. Do whatever you like. 🙂

So you have two weeks from now to get something ready!

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Appreciation Day : Summary

Yesterday was the OTN Appreciation Day. The plan was to mobilise the Oracle community to say #ThanksOTN for everything Oracle Technology Network (OTN) have done for the Oracle community over the years. You can obviously search on Twitter for #ThanksOTN, but I’ve compiled a list of blog posts here, so contact me if you’re missing! They are ordered chronologically, or at least in the order I found them. There are some posts with similar, or the same, name. Multiple people can have the same favourite feature. 🙂

OTN Appreciation Day +1. 🙂

Check out pieter v. puymbroeck, who wrote a script (here) to scrape the results from Twitter. Ruben Rodriguez did a similar thing using MCS and JET. I did it the long and painful way because I’m an old-timer. 🙂

Thanks to everyone that wrote a blog post. It was good to see some new, nearly new and returning faces, as well as the usual suspects. I was glad to see some of our Latin American community blogging in Spanish. What’s really cool is the diversity of stuff people posted. Some people took it in a completely different direction, which made it more interesting. Thanks to all those people that tweeted messages of support and retweeted content throughout the day. We got people joining in because they saw the buzz you helped create! And of course, #ThanksOTN. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Some latecomers added. 🙂

OTN Appreciation Day : Data Pump (expdp, impdp)

pump Here’s my contribution to the OTN Appreciation Day.

Data Pump (expdp, impdp) was added in Oracle 10g as a replacement for the rather tired exp/imp utilities, which although useful, were severely lacking in functionality. So why do I like Data Pump? Here are a few standouts for me, but I’m sure other people will prefer others. 🙂

Transportable Tablespaces, and from 12c onward Transportable Database, make moving large amounts of data, or even whole databases easy. This can include platform/endian changes and version upgrade too. This was possible with exp/imp too, but it doesn’t stop it being a useful feature of Data Pump. 🙂
The INCLUDE, EXCLUDE, CONTENT and QUERY parameters allow a lot of flexibility about what you include or exclude from your exports and imports.
The FLASHBACK_TIME parameter allows you to do an export of the data based on a point in time, undo permitting, which allows you to make truly consistent exports.
The REMAP parameters allow you to rename tablespaces, datafiles, schemas, tables and even alter the data during operations.
The DBMS_DATAPUMP package provides a PL/SQL API, allowing you to perform Data Pump operations without having to shell out to the OS. That makes automation a lot simpler.
The NETWORK_LINK parameter can be used to perform export and import operations over a database link. This allows you to create a dump file on a remote database, or even import without an intermediate dump file.

I’m sure beginners think Data Pump is just for doing exports and imports of small databases, but it’s got loads of features. If you’ve not kept up with the new releases, you might be surprised just how much it can do!

If you’re interested in reading something more technical about Data Pump, here are some articles from my website.

Cheers

Tim…